I tend to agree that they should just have called Windows 7 done, sacked most of the developers and made as much money as possible shipping the same product until it became irrelevant, but that would have been a hard sell internally.
They don't have to kill the entire project team and milk it until it dies. They can just aim more for evolutionary than revolutionary improvement and continue the line. They can probably cut costs somewhat in the process, but they probably make so much money on Windows, why put the whole franchise at risk to save a few million a year? That is the kind of MBA thinking that drives me nuts. I've seen companies take products with HUGE margins and then nickel and dime the manufacturing process until they're no longer able to reliably supply the market. The result is that they save millions and lose billions. Shaving an extra 30 cents on a $200 product with a $150 margin is penny wise and pound foolish unless it has basically no risk at all. If you're selling a commodity like low-grade toilet paper it makes more sense.
MS is failing to understand their market with this decision. The people who are keeping them rich don't want a revolution, even if they ask for it. The reason they use Windows/Office is because it has had a stable history going back 20+ years now with easy transition plans and long support timelines (I'm sure Win8 still supports non-USB floppy drives). Sure, dealing with cruft is annoying and bugs the purists, but they're making a FORTUNE because they've done just this.
Every time they talk about dropping legacy support or massive changes all I hear is a company that isn't content to merely make billions throw it all away on a gamble. By all means do experimental work on the side and try to create new markets/etc with new products, or optional functionality on your existing products. Offer the Metro interface as an option, by all means, and see if it goes anywhere. You're making billions - you can afford to burn a few million on the occasional MS Bob. However, you don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
You don't see Google saying that they're going to drop their search engine so that they can focus more on their tablet designs.
Linux isn't free. I've never met a CEO who wanted to base his/her business on unsupported software. By supported, I mean when something goes down, they want a throat to grab (and sue if things get really bad).
When you buy a copy of Office for $400 or whatever, you get almost no support. That is just licensing, and that is where the savings are on Linux (to start). Support is on top of that.
If you have a serious problem on RHEL, I suspect you'll end up getting put in touch with somebody who probably wrote it (or something related), and has the power to change it. You'll probably get hotfixes, public bugtracking, etc. RHEL also has to compete because ANYBODY can take CentOS and sell their own support around it with just as much power to patch/etc as RedHat.
With MS you can't even look at their bug lists, and you'll have to work your way through endless layers of scripts before you talk to somebody with expertise unless you buy $500k/yr in services. Nobody other than MS can do much to fix their products since they are proprietary. They can maybe provide some first line phone support, but if MS Word has a bug, only MS can fix it - you can't even patch it yourself.
So, support might be important, but not all support is created equal.
Due process of law HAS been observed. The current state of law is...
That isn't really a valid interpretation, even if it is the one courts operate under.
The law is subservient to the constitution, not the other way around. If congress passed a law stating that cops could write their own warrants without cause as long as it was a sunny day, that wouldn't mean that due process is being followed. Due process is the kind of process envisioned by the drafters of the constitution and its amendments. Anything else is just process, and not "due process."
What's the point of having a constitution if all that it takes to bypass it is have a law passed?
Sure, there is no question that the police have the power to execute their warrant, and while I see no constitutional requirement to cooperate I can easily see how they could arrest you for interference.
I think you would be very hard-pressed indeed to find anyone (at least in the US) who has ever been incarcerated for 50 years for contempt of court. I should be very much interested indeed if you could find such a case.
Since contempt isn't a "crime" per-se, it doesn't have statues, or sentencing guidelines. 50 years is a bit of hyperbole - even most life sentences don't end up being that long simply as a result of life expectancy. However, as you point out the "sentence" is indefinite. If it were 30 years you could at least say that on some date you'd be able to look forward to freedom.
The big problem with statins (from a pharma standpoint) is that they hit on the perfect one right away and the patent is soon going to expire, opening the door to generics.
I suspect that this will become more the norm. Back in the 90s there were a plethora of tools for designing drugs that didn't exist beforehand, so taking old drugs and running them through the new methods often led to new drugs in the same class which were just all-around better.
However, not a whole lot has changed in that department - when we come up with a new drug today it works VERY well. Even if you compare a statin like atorvastatin which clearly is superior to simvastatin, the differences just aren't as dramatic as the improvements you'd have found in the past. The people who came up with simvastatin did a good job with it. If a better drug is developed, it is often not long-after (sometimes by the same company that came up with the original drug - they just worked on both in parallel).
Revolutions will only come by better understanding the pathology of disease, especially factors that are unique to each individual. Even so, if a true revolution comes along, expect all the low-hanging fruit to get grabbed pretty quickly. Despite the apparent non-productivity of modern pharma R&D, it isn't from lack of effort. If a good idea comes along BILLIONS of dollars and THOUSANDS of scientists will be working on it at a very efficient pace. If it pans out expect to see a flood of drug applications, and then another drought as everybody waits for the next revolution.
If that is the case then all somebody needs to do is a number of large clinical trials to prove that the single isomer is both safe and effective and submit a marketing application. There is a decent chance it would be accepted.
Of course, it will cost probably $100M or so to do all those trials, regardless of outcome, and the drug isn't patented so you won't make more than a few cents per pill selling it. The only way it will happen is if the government funds it.
Oh, and because of the safety concerns you'll have to do a ton of screening tests in healthy adults and animals before they'll let you anywhere near a pregnant mother. A fetus can't give informed consent. It is entirely possible that you'll sink a lot of money in pre-clinical testing only to be denied permission to run a trial on pregnant women, who are of course the target of the drug in the first place.
If the drives were connected to your computer, then it's hard to say you don't have the password.
Isn't the matter of whether you know the password or not a matter of fact, and therefore a matter of a jury decision? My problem with contempt of court in general is that it is a punishment for a crime without a trial. The crime is ignoring the directives of the court, and the punishment is lifetime imprisonment, unless the judge gets bored and lets you out sooner (so it is arbitrary as well). Your guilt is determined by the judge who witnessed and charged you with the crime. At no point is a jury of your peers involved, even though the sentence might be harsher than just about any crime short of premeditated homicide.
Think about it this way. If you got angry with the judge's ruling, managed to run up to the bench without being tackled by the bailiff, and managed to break the judge's neck in a moment of passion, chances are you wouldn't get more than 10-20 years in prison. However, a reporter who refuses to divulge their sources or divulge a decryption key for their hard drive can spend 50 years in prison. How does this make any sense?
For example, if you have a lockbox with incriminating documentation, and the police can provide sufficient evidence for a warrant, you can be required to unlock the box.
I don't see that written in the constitution anywhere. Sure, that is what courts have enforced, just like they force people to divulge decryption keys. The fact that courts do it doesn't mean that this is what the founding fathers intended.
You think you are being funny but you keep it up, you will find yourself an aging bachelor before you know it. Don't buy into the line there's someone for everyone or worse, think they will come to you when the time is right.
There are certainly worse things to be in life than an aging bachelor. Being married to somebody who drives you crazy is certainly one of them! My advice: be picky, and be content to never marry.
I'm old enough to remember peaceniks, the FAS, etc, whining and moaning that the turbine engine would fail within a few miles in a real war because it hadn't been tested enough under harsh conditions.
I'm not familiar with the testing program for the M1, but in hindsight it would appear that they were wrong.
My personal assessment is that if NK fires off a single ICBM at the US West Coast that it will more likely than not be shot down. If they fired off a few or one with a MIRV, I'm not so sure. Whether that helps people in San Francisco or politicians in DC sleep better at night, I couldn't say. I guess it comes down to how good is good enough when you're talking about nuclear warheads.
However, there is no fundamental issue of physics involved - I'm sure an anti ballistic missile system could be designed which is capable of stopping an arbitrary number of incoming warheads over any area. It just will likely be fairly expensive to field.
I wouldn't use the word "operational" to describe a system that has yet to be used successfully in actual conflict and which has only been tested a handful of times.
So the M-1 Abrams tank didn't become "operational" until Desert Storm?
I'm sure the M-1 was tested more than a handful of times before Desert Storm. Note the word "and" - it has a very specific definition.
It's been in operational status for 7 years. Interceptor sites are Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenburg AFB.
Those are the test sites. I wouldn't use the word "operational" to describe a system that has yet to be used successfully in actual conflict and which has only been tested a handful of times. Perhaps the military feels otherwise. But, no point in quibbling over definitions - the US deployment of the system is what I was referring to when I said it was being tested today.
Then we'll make new missiles that have an even faster terminal stage velocity
No, we'll make missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles. (Oh, wait: we did that 40 years ago.)
I wasn't suggesting that speed was the only way to avoid interception. There are many tactics, which are each vulnerable to counter-tactics in turn. Right now ICBM interception is barely possible at all, so tossing 10x as many warheads into the mix is a sound strategy. When we get to the point where ICBMs are reliably intercepted I'm not sure it will still work.
You forget that there's a minimum price below which stores can't sell goods and expect to stay in business for very long.
I was only speaking to the issues with price fixing, which are generally about gouging consumers by fixing prices higher than what would be the case with a free market. Amazon is not guilty of that particular offense, as far as I'm aware.
Selling goods as a loss-leader is an entirely different matter - one which should be illegal. Amazon may very well be guilty of that, but everything I've been hearing says that they sell their non-book items at a loss to try to establish themselves. Obviously they can't be selling EVERYTHING at a loss and still making profit.
Which I think reinforces my notion that we *can* intercept ICBMs, since we *can* intercept IRBMs.
We absolutely can intercept ICBMs - it is already being tested today. As I stated in my second post in this thread, "The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light."
Right now ICBMs cannot be reliably intercepted - that could change. Then we'll make new missiles that have an even faster terminal stage velocity, and then interceptors will get faster, and then missiles with get faster, and so on.
The final advantage rests with the offensive side - in order to defend against a missile you have to see it, and if the offensive missile is coming in at close to the speed of light you won't even see it coming. Of course, but the time we get to that point the battle will be being played in space, as building space-based warships would be trivially cheap compared to accelerating massive weapons to near-light-speeds.
Makes sense. Usually stores just set their own prices, so the store obviously has control over the minimum they sell at. That isn't a problem unless they're in collusion with other stores, or in Apple's case forcing their supplier to do the collusion for them.
In the end, if the Japanese decide they don't like whaling it they can vote for representatives who can change the laws. In the meantime it's simple supply and demand. Economic forces are what will ultimately stop whaling, not a bunch of whining hippies.
The only economic force that would stop whaling would be the extinction of whales. That's why hunting endangered species is regulated by law in virtually every country on Earth (even in the 3rd world).
If the Japanese don't play ball chances are they'll find themselves on the bad side of international sanctions (tariffs, etc). Japan isn't some 3rd world country - most of what they export gets consumed by nations with sophisticated voters who are likely to be quite sympathetic to crackdowns on whaling. If the US and EU agreed to put an across-the-board tariff on all Japanese products until they change their laws there really isn't anybody who could do anything about it.
Well, the price is the same (actually, many iPhone games are cheaper due to inflation), but it isn't quite the same thing. The publishers make the games with the plan to sell them for a dollar, and they get a dollar for every copy sold, and nobody loses anything.
Some factors that make phone apps different: 1. You have a single retailer (the app store / play store / etc). That means that even if they were stuck with inventory they could make the strategic decision to not depreciate the market without worrying about a competitor doing it instead. 2. There is no cost of distribution/inventory - so there is no need to predict how well anything would sell and maintain stock. All the risk is with the publisher, so they have incentive to not make junk.
With physical goods the costs of distribution and inventory are considerable, so there is always a battle to be fought over who incurs this risk. With multiple retailers if you're stuck with inventory but keep the prices high, and somebody else lowers prices, then the market still crashes but instead of getting fire sale income you get no income at all. With a crazy system where retailers think they have no risk when in reality they actually are holding all the risk they can get scammed by fly-by-night publishers.
You're still under the delusion that India somehow is targeting (or wants to target) their nukes at us to defend against our navy,
I never claimed that India wanted to use nuclear weapons against US naval targets. I haven't mentioned India once in this thread. My first post started with "Both the US and the USSR had the capability of conducting nuclear war against naval task forces, potentially with ICBMs."
Why anybody would think that the US would want to invade India is beyond me. They'd bankrupt us just from having to feed everybody in the lands we captured.
which is so absurd as to call all your technical assumptions into question.
If you doubt my facts do some research. You can just look up the Wikipedia article on ICBMs to find that terminal velocities are multiple km/s, and I'm sure FAS has a ton of stuff as well. The rest is just physics.
Just about anything in general service today. Very few SAM systems can hit ICBMs - they're basically just fielded by the US and they're not really ready for prime time (the launcher basically needs to be right along the path of the ICBM to hit it at anything other than boost phase).
They might maneuver to be harder to hit, or they might have other countermeasures, or they might perform a terminal burn to increase their velocity even further
You're 50 years behind the curve: the AS-4 "Kitchen" was designed in the 1950s and put into service 51 years ago had a terminal dive of Mach 4.6.
Uh, mach 5 is pretty slow by ICBM standards. A typical ICBM warhead is coming in at somewhere around mach 25. You'd need quite a large booster to significantly increase its speed still further.
Intercepting a missile at mach 5 is well within the capabilities of the most advanced SAM systems.
Right now we're at the point where the state of the art in defense can just barely handle an ICBM (and I'm not sure that they can do so if the launcher itself is the target, as opposed to another vessel downrange). ICBMs are basically as fast as a ballistic warhead can go, since they have to travel at less than orbital velocity to hit anything other than the launch site. To go faster you need a non-ballistic trajectory (which is less efficient, but can go arbitrarily fast (for a definition of arbitrary that gets weird at relativistic speeds)).
Some lighthouses in Russia are powered by RITEGs about the size of a large fridge...good luck collecting enough nuclear material to build such a thing though.
Yup, if you google around you can find stories about bad things that have happened to people who have tried to take such things apart not realizing what they are. I hadn't heard about lighthouses, but I have heard about them being used for radio beacons (more or less the same thing at a different wavelength and rate of "rotation").
Hence the reason I said, "The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light."
ICBMs are too fast for conventional SAMs to intercept, and as a result more modern defenses are being built to counter them. The next logical step is non-ballistic warheads. They might maneuver to be harder to hit, or they might have other countermeasures, or they might perform a terminal burn to increase their velocity even further (I'm talking about a substantial burn here - ie bringing along a booster rocket and not just a few kg of propellant for corrections).
There really is no fundamental limit to how far this can go. It really just depends on our propulsion technology (unless you want to lob weapons that take months to reach their targets you need a lot of impulse fired in space to direct a weapon back down at much higher than orbital velocity or at near-vertical trajectories (which also make interception harder)).
Cruise and Kelt missiles are what they would have tried to nuke ships with, not ICBMs.
Sure, but that was back before modern SAMs were capable of shooting them down. Missiles need to get faster to make it through modern defense systems, and the ICBM is just the fastest missile technology that currently exists.
Right now "cruise torpedoes" seem like the better technology for getting past defenses but only because nobody uses them and therefore no defense has been built. If you can intercept a missile then you can probably intercept a torpedo as well.
The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light. Of course, for a warhead to have a higher terminal velocity than from an ICBM it would need to be non-ballistic at some point after the boost phase (once you give an ICBM the power to go halfway around the world any additional power just makes it hit the launching point)..
NSLs are super duper top secret, and you can't tell anybody about them.
I don't get this. If providers/libraries/etc really wanted to get rid of NSLs they'd just have a message show up on on the webpage every time you login saying "we can confirm that we've never received an NSL asking for your data." Then one day you log in and the message changes "in your particular case we can neither confirm nor deny that we've received an NSL asking for your data." As far as I can tell this would fully comply with the letter of the law.
The problem is that you're generally constrained to placing those two screens directly side-by-side horizontally.
If I switched from my current 4:3 monitor to a 16:9 one I'd end up getting a smaller screen, because I couldn't expand the width of the monitor until it had an equal area. Above my monitor there is nothing until you reach the ceiling, but next to it I have other stuff on my desk.
Sure, you can place stuff side-by-side with a widescreen, but that doesn't change the fact that you have far less vertical space available on either window, and usually vertical space is the kind most in demand.
About the only thing that widescreen monitors make sense for are watching movies. If I want to watch a movie I'll go watch it on my TV - I don't live in a dorm or something.
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I tend to agree that they should just have called Windows 7 done, sacked most of the developers and made as much money as possible shipping the same product until it became irrelevant, but that would have been a hard sell internally.
They don't have to kill the entire project team and milk it until it dies. They can just aim more for evolutionary than revolutionary improvement and continue the line. They can probably cut costs somewhat in the process, but they probably make so much money on Windows, why put the whole franchise at risk to save a few million a year? That is the kind of MBA thinking that drives me nuts. I've seen companies take products with HUGE margins and then nickel and dime the manufacturing process until they're no longer able to reliably supply the market. The result is that they save millions and lose billions. Shaving an extra 30 cents on a $200 product with a $150 margin is penny wise and pound foolish unless it has basically no risk at all. If you're selling a commodity like low-grade toilet paper it makes more sense.
MS is failing to understand their market with this decision. The people who are keeping them rich don't want a revolution, even if they ask for it. The reason they use Windows/Office is because it has had a stable history going back 20+ years now with easy transition plans and long support timelines (I'm sure Win8 still supports non-USB floppy drives). Sure, dealing with cruft is annoying and bugs the purists, but they're making a FORTUNE because they've done just this.
Every time they talk about dropping legacy support or massive changes all I hear is a company that isn't content to merely make billions throw it all away on a gamble. By all means do experimental work on the side and try to create new markets/etc with new products, or optional functionality on your existing products. Offer the Metro interface as an option, by all means, and see if it goes anywhere. You're making billions - you can afford to burn a few million on the occasional MS Bob. However, you don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
You don't see Google saying that they're going to drop their search engine so that they can focus more on their tablet designs.
Linux isn't free. I've never met a CEO who wanted to base his/her business on unsupported software. By supported, I mean when something goes down, they want a throat to grab (and sue if things get really bad).
When you buy a copy of Office for $400 or whatever, you get almost no support. That is just licensing, and that is where the savings are on Linux (to start). Support is on top of that.
If you have a serious problem on RHEL, I suspect you'll end up getting put in touch with somebody who probably wrote it (or something related), and has the power to change it. You'll probably get hotfixes, public bugtracking, etc. RHEL also has to compete because ANYBODY can take CentOS and sell their own support around it with just as much power to patch/etc as RedHat.
With MS you can't even look at their bug lists, and you'll have to work your way through endless layers of scripts before you talk to somebody with expertise unless you buy $500k/yr in services. Nobody other than MS can do much to fix their products since they are proprietary. They can maybe provide some first line phone support, but if MS Word has a bug, only MS can fix it - you can't even patch it yourself.
So, support might be important, but not all support is created equal.
Due process of law HAS been observed. The current state of law is...
That isn't really a valid interpretation, even if it is the one courts operate under.
The law is subservient to the constitution, not the other way around. If congress passed a law stating that cops could write their own warrants without cause as long as it was a sunny day, that wouldn't mean that due process is being followed. Due process is the kind of process envisioned by the drafters of the constitution and its amendments. Anything else is just process, and not "due process."
What's the point of having a constitution if all that it takes to bypass it is have a law passed?
Sure, there is no question that the police have the power to execute their warrant, and while I see no constitutional requirement to cooperate I can easily see how they could arrest you for interference.
I think you would be very hard-pressed indeed to find anyone (at least in the US) who has ever been incarcerated for 50 years for contempt of court. I should be very much interested indeed if you could find such a case.
Since contempt isn't a "crime" per-se, it doesn't have statues, or sentencing guidelines. 50 years is a bit of hyperbole - even most life sentences don't end up being that long simply as a result of life expectancy. However, as you point out the "sentence" is indefinite. If it were 30 years you could at least say that on some date you'd be able to look forward to freedom.
The big problem with statins (from a pharma standpoint) is that they hit on the perfect one right away and the patent is soon going to expire, opening the door to generics.
I suspect that this will become more the norm. Back in the 90s there were a plethora of tools for designing drugs that didn't exist beforehand, so taking old drugs and running them through the new methods often led to new drugs in the same class which were just all-around better.
However, not a whole lot has changed in that department - when we come up with a new drug today it works VERY well. Even if you compare a statin like atorvastatin which clearly is superior to simvastatin, the differences just aren't as dramatic as the improvements you'd have found in the past. The people who came up with simvastatin did a good job with it. If a better drug is developed, it is often not long-after (sometimes by the same company that came up with the original drug - they just worked on both in parallel).
Revolutions will only come by better understanding the pathology of disease, especially factors that are unique to each individual. Even so, if a true revolution comes along, expect all the low-hanging fruit to get grabbed pretty quickly. Despite the apparent non-productivity of modern pharma R&D, it isn't from lack of effort. If a good idea comes along BILLIONS of dollars and THOUSANDS of scientists will be working on it at a very efficient pace. If it pans out expect to see a flood of drug applications, and then another drought as everybody waits for the next revolution.
If that is the case then all somebody needs to do is a number of large clinical trials to prove that the single isomer is both safe and effective and submit a marketing application. There is a decent chance it would be accepted.
Of course, it will cost probably $100M or so to do all those trials, regardless of outcome, and the drug isn't patented so you won't make more than a few cents per pill selling it. The only way it will happen is if the government funds it.
Oh, and because of the safety concerns you'll have to do a ton of screening tests in healthy adults and animals before they'll let you anywhere near a pregnant mother. A fetus can't give informed consent. It is entirely possible that you'll sink a lot of money in pre-clinical testing only to be denied permission to run a trial on pregnant women, who are of course the target of the drug in the first place.
If the drives were connected to your computer, then it's hard to say you don't have the password.
Isn't the matter of whether you know the password or not a matter of fact, and therefore a matter of a jury decision? My problem with contempt of court in general is that it is a punishment for a crime without a trial. The crime is ignoring the directives of the court, and the punishment is lifetime imprisonment, unless the judge gets bored and lets you out sooner (so it is arbitrary as well). Your guilt is determined by the judge who witnessed and charged you with the crime. At no point is a jury of your peers involved, even though the sentence might be harsher than just about any crime short of premeditated homicide.
Think about it this way. If you got angry with the judge's ruling, managed to run up to the bench without being tackled by the bailiff, and managed to break the judge's neck in a moment of passion, chances are you wouldn't get more than 10-20 years in prison. However, a reporter who refuses to divulge their sources or divulge a decryption key for their hard drive can spend 50 years in prison. How does this make any sense?
For example, if you have a lockbox with incriminating documentation, and the police can provide sufficient evidence for a warrant, you can be required to unlock the box.
I don't see that written in the constitution anywhere. Sure, that is what courts have enforced, just like they force people to divulge decryption keys. The fact that courts do it doesn't mean that this is what the founding fathers intended.
You think you are being funny but you keep it up, you will find yourself an aging bachelor before you know it. Don't buy into the line there's someone for everyone or worse, think they will come to you when the time is right.
There are certainly worse things to be in life than an aging bachelor. Being married to somebody who drives you crazy is certainly one of them! My advice: be picky, and be content to never marry.
I'm old enough to remember peaceniks, the FAS, etc, whining and moaning that the turbine engine would fail within a few miles in a real war because it hadn't been tested enough under harsh conditions.
I'm not familiar with the testing program for the M1, but in hindsight it would appear that they were wrong.
My personal assessment is that if NK fires off a single ICBM at the US West Coast that it will more likely than not be shot down. If they fired off a few or one with a MIRV, I'm not so sure. Whether that helps people in San Francisco or politicians in DC sleep better at night, I couldn't say. I guess it comes down to how good is good enough when you're talking about nuclear warheads.
However, there is no fundamental issue of physics involved - I'm sure an anti ballistic missile system could be designed which is capable of stopping an arbitrary number of incoming warheads over any area. It just will likely be fairly expensive to field.
I wouldn't use the word "operational" to describe a system that has yet to be used successfully in actual conflict and which has only been tested a handful of times.
So the M-1 Abrams tank didn't become "operational" until Desert Storm?
I'm sure the M-1 was tested more than a handful of times before Desert Storm. Note the word "and" - it has a very specific definition.
it is already being tested today.
It's been in operational status for 7 years. Interceptor sites are Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenburg AFB.
Those are the test sites. I wouldn't use the word "operational" to describe a system that has yet to be used successfully in actual conflict and which has only been tested a handful of times. Perhaps the military feels otherwise. But, no point in quibbling over definitions - the US deployment of the system is what I was referring to when I said it was being tested today.
Then we'll make new missiles that have an even faster terminal stage velocity
No, we'll make missiles with multiple independent reentry vehicles. (Oh, wait: we did that 40 years ago.)
I wasn't suggesting that speed was the only way to avoid interception. There are many tactics, which are each vulnerable to counter-tactics in turn. Right now ICBM interception is barely possible at all, so tossing 10x as many warheads into the mix is a sound strategy. When we get to the point where ICBMs are reliably intercepted I'm not sure it will still work.
You forget that there's a minimum price below which stores can't sell goods and expect to stay in business for very long.
I was only speaking to the issues with price fixing, which are generally about gouging consumers by fixing prices higher than what would be the case with a free market. Amazon is not guilty of that particular offense, as far as I'm aware.
Selling goods as a loss-leader is an entirely different matter - one which should be illegal. Amazon may very well be guilty of that, but everything I've been hearing says that they sell their non-book items at a loss to try to establish themselves. Obviously they can't be selling EVERYTHING at a loss and still making profit.
Which I think reinforces my notion that we *can* intercept ICBMs, since we *can* intercept IRBMs.
We absolutely can intercept ICBMs - it is already being tested today. As I stated in my second post in this thread, "The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light."
Right now ICBMs cannot be reliably intercepted - that could change. Then we'll make new missiles that have an even faster terminal stage velocity, and then interceptors will get faster, and then missiles with get faster, and so on.
The final advantage rests with the offensive side - in order to defend against a missile you have to see it, and if the offensive missile is coming in at close to the speed of light you won't even see it coming. Of course, but the time we get to that point the battle will be being played in space, as building space-based warships would be trivially cheap compared to accelerating massive weapons to near-light-speeds.
Makes sense. Usually stores just set their own prices, so the store obviously has control over the minimum they sell at. That isn't a problem unless they're in collusion with other stores, or in Apple's case forcing their supplier to do the collusion for them.
In the end, if the Japanese decide they don't like whaling it they can vote for representatives who can change the laws. In the meantime it's simple supply and demand. Economic forces are what will ultimately stop whaling, not a bunch of whining hippies.
The only economic force that would stop whaling would be the extinction of whales. That's why hunting endangered species is regulated by law in virtually every country on Earth (even in the 3rd world).
If the Japanese don't play ball chances are they'll find themselves on the bad side of international sanctions (tariffs, etc). Japan isn't some 3rd world country - most of what they export gets consumed by nations with sophisticated voters who are likely to be quite sympathetic to crackdowns on whaling. If the US and EU agreed to put an across-the-board tariff on all Japanese products until they change their laws there really isn't anybody who could do anything about it.
Well, the price is the same (actually, many iPhone games are cheaper due to inflation), but it isn't quite the same thing. The publishers make the games with the plan to sell them for a dollar, and they get a dollar for every copy sold, and nobody loses anything.
Some factors that make phone apps different:
1. You have a single retailer (the app store / play store / etc). That means that even if they were stuck with inventory they could make the strategic decision to not depreciate the market without worrying about a competitor doing it instead.
2. There is no cost of distribution/inventory - so there is no need to predict how well anything would sell and maintain stock. All the risk is with the publisher, so they have incentive to not make junk.
With physical goods the costs of distribution and inventory are considerable, so there is always a battle to be fought over who incurs this risk. With multiple retailers if you're stuck with inventory but keep the prices high, and somebody else lowers prices, then the market still crashes but instead of getting fire sale income you get no income at all. With a crazy system where retailers think they have no risk when in reality they actually are holding all the risk they can get scammed by fly-by-night publishers.
You're still under the delusion that India somehow is targeting (or wants to target) their nukes at us to defend against our navy,
I never claimed that India wanted to use nuclear weapons against US naval targets. I haven't mentioned India once in this thread. My first post started with "Both the US and the USSR had the capability of conducting nuclear war against naval task forces, potentially with ICBMs."
Why anybody would think that the US would want to invade India is beyond me. They'd bankrupt us just from having to feed everybody in the lands we captured.
which is so absurd as to call all your technical assumptions into question.
If you doubt my facts do some research. You can just look up the Wikipedia article on ICBMs to find that terminal velocities are multiple km/s, and I'm sure FAS has a ton of stuff as well. The rest is just physics.
ICBMs are too fast for conventional SAMs
What do you consider a "conventional" SAM?
Just about anything in general service today. Very few SAM systems can hit ICBMs - they're basically just fielded by the US and they're not really ready for prime time (the launcher basically needs to be right along the path of the ICBM to hit it at anything other than boost phase).
They might maneuver to be harder to hit, or they might have other countermeasures, or they might perform a terminal burn to increase their velocity even further
You're 50 years behind the curve: the AS-4 "Kitchen" was designed in the 1950s and put into service 51 years ago had a terminal dive of Mach 4.6.
Uh, mach 5 is pretty slow by ICBM standards. A typical ICBM warhead is coming in at somewhere around mach 25. You'd need quite a large booster to significantly increase its speed still further.
Intercepting a missile at mach 5 is well within the capabilities of the most advanced SAM systems.
Right now we're at the point where the state of the art in defense can just barely handle an ICBM (and I'm not sure that they can do so if the launcher itself is the target, as opposed to another vessel downrange). ICBMs are basically as fast as a ballistic warhead can go, since they have to travel at less than orbital velocity to hit anything other than the launch site. To go faster you need a non-ballistic trajectory (which is less efficient, but can go arbitrarily fast (for a definition of arbitrary that gets weird at relativistic speeds)).
Some lighthouses in Russia are powered by RITEGs about the size of a large fridge...good luck collecting enough nuclear material to build such a thing though.
Yup, if you google around you can find stories about bad things that have happened to people who have tried to take such things apart not realizing what they are. I hadn't heard about lighthouses, but I have heard about them being used for radio beacons (more or less the same thing at a different wavelength and rate of "rotation").
Star Wars.
Hence the reason I said, "The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light."
ICBMs are too fast for conventional SAMs to intercept, and as a result more modern defenses are being built to counter them. The next logical step is non-ballistic warheads. They might maneuver to be harder to hit, or they might have other countermeasures, or they might perform a terminal burn to increase their velocity even further (I'm talking about a substantial burn here - ie bringing along a booster rocket and not just a few kg of propellant for corrections).
There really is no fundamental limit to how far this can go. It really just depends on our propulsion technology (unless you want to lob weapons that take months to reach their targets you need a lot of impulse fired in space to direct a weapon back down at much higher than orbital velocity or at near-vertical trajectories (which also make interception harder)).
Cruise and Kelt missiles are what they would have tried to nuke ships with, not ICBMs.
Sure, but that was back before modern SAMs were capable of shooting them down. Missiles need to get faster to make it through modern defense systems, and the ICBM is just the fastest missile technology that currently exists.
Right now "cruise torpedoes" seem like the better technology for getting past defenses but only because nobody uses them and therefore no defense has been built. If you can intercept a missile then you can probably intercept a torpedo as well.
The only fundamental limit to how far that cat and mouse game can go seems to be the speed of light. Of course, for a warhead to have a higher terminal velocity than from an ICBM it would need to be non-ballistic at some point after the boost phase (once you give an ICBM the power to go halfway around the world any additional power just makes it hit the launching point)..
NSLs are super duper top secret, and you can't tell anybody about them.
I don't get this. If providers/libraries/etc really wanted to get rid of NSLs they'd just have a message show up on on the webpage every time you login saying "we can confirm that we've never received an NSL asking for your data." Then one day you log in and the message changes "in your particular case we can neither confirm nor deny that we've received an NSL asking for your data." As far as I can tell this would fully comply with the letter of the law.
The problem is that you're generally constrained to placing those two screens directly side-by-side horizontally.
If I switched from my current 4:3 monitor to a 16:9 one I'd end up getting a smaller screen, because I couldn't expand the width of the monitor until it had an equal area. Above my monitor there is nothing until you reach the ceiling, but next to it I have other stuff on my desk.
Sure, you can place stuff side-by-side with a widescreen, but that doesn't change the fact that you have far less vertical space available on either window, and usually vertical space is the kind most in demand.
About the only thing that widescreen monitors make sense for are watching movies. If I want to watch a movie I'll go watch it on my TV - I don't live in a dorm or something.